Visual Baseball: Who’s got the Tools?

Here’s a piping-hot serving of 5 Tool Analyzer, fresh out of the oven and ready for your consumption. I’m hoping to do installments like this throughout the season – in this installment you’ll see 6 very different players with very different skill sets.

For those of you who were thrown by the Tony Gwynn reference, I was indeed referring to his son. “Jr” has been added to the visual, so Tony Gwynn Senior can rest easy. As far as his arm is concerned, I’m not sure what to tell you. I’m the guy who visualizes this metrics, not invents them. I have to say, though, that some of the defensive metrics seem to raise eyebrows at times. Hopefully they’ll evolve and become more and more representative of reality…

Um, where are you getting this information? Fangraphs shows Phillips as equal to or better than Soriano in pretty much every facet except power this year. Granted, he is having a career season, but he was better than Soriano last year, too.

There does appear to be some problem with the underlying stats, cause Brandon Phillips definitely has a higher OBP than Soriano this year. It’s my fault, since I compile the stats for Kevin. I’ll follow up on this.